comitia against the
majority. To every individual, who possessed the easy art of
addressing untutored ears or of merely throwing away money, a path was
opened up for his acquiring a position or procuring a decree in his
favour, to which the magistrates and the government were formally
bound to do homage. Hence sprang those citizen-generals, accustomed
to sketch plans of battle on the tables of taverns and to look down on
the regular service with compassion by virtue of their inborn genius
for strategy: hence those staff-officers, who owed their command to
the canvassing intrigues of the capital and, whenever matters looked
serious, had at once to get leave of absence -en masse-; and hence
the battles on the Trasimene lake and at Cannae, and the disgraceful
management of the war with Perseus. At every step the government
was thwarted and led astray by those incalculable decrees of the
burgesses, and as was to be expected, most of all in the very
cases where it was most in the right.

But the weakening of the government and the weakening of the community
itself were among the lesser dangers that sprang from this demagogism.
Still more directly the factious violence of individual ambition
pushed itself forward under the aegis of the constitutional rights of
the burgesses. That which formally issued forth as the will of the
supreme authority in the state was in reality very often the mere
personal pleasure of the mover; and what was to be the fate of a
commonwealth in which war and peace, the nomination and deposition of
the general and his officers, the public chest and the public
property, were dependent on the caprices of the multitude and its
accidental leaders? The thunder-storm had not yet burst; but the
clouds were gathering in denser masses, and occasional peals of
thunder were already rolling through the sultry air. It was a
circumstance, moreover, fraught with double danger, that the
tendencies which were apparently most opposite met together at their
extremes both as regarded ends and as regarded means. Family policy
and demagogism carried on a similar and equally dangerous rivalry in
patronizing and worshipping the rabble. Gaius Flaminius was regarded
by the statesmen of the following generation as the initiator of that
course from which proceeded the reforms of the Gracchi and--we may
add--the democratico-monarchical revolution that ensued. But Publius
Scipio also, although setting the fashion to the